Actually, one of the major experiments 'debunking' cold fusion in the beginning (the MIT study) turned out to have used improperly manipulated data and was a false negative.
In the aftermath of the media storm surrounding cold fusion, merely mentioning an interest in the theory (unless you specifically stated you wanted to debunk it) was grounds for dismissal at many scientific institutions.
Cold Fusion (in the sense that a nuclear reaction happens at approximate room temperature by chemical processes) is happening. thousands of papers have been published proving the effect. No, they haven't been published in any respected 'peer-reviewed' papers, because any mention of CF is immediately declared impossible and bad-science.
I don't care where 'e grips it, quantum swallows are both migrat'ry an' non-migrat'ry at the same time. The real question is whether or not Schrodinger's Cat can catch one before the collapse of the coconut waveform.
Ya know, that's all well and good, but I just wanted to point out that humans and some other terrestrial plants and animals can and do live in a long day cycle. Above the arctic circle, there are towns that don't see sun for up to 67 days each year, at winter solstice, and have continuous sun for over 4 days in summer (atmospheric refraction accounts for why its not balanced)
From TFA "Fuel Depot Challenge: Expected to award a $5 million prize to the first team to build, launch and demonstrate a sub-scale facility that could store or produce liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen - used to fuel spacecraft - in Earth orbit. In November 2005, NASA chief Michael Griffin said future space missions would rely on privately built fuel stations for resupply."
Basically this is little more than a satellite with onboard fuel storage / generation.
Without a significant orbital industry, the only way I can think to "produce" liquid hydrogen and oxygen in situ would be to ship water to the satellite and use solar or nuclear power to crack and compress it. Aside from the water delivery the whole thing could easily be done robotically.
Yes, it will probably cost 10-20 mil to develop and put it up there, but certainly not 100 mil.
PS. From the actual proposed rules, all you have to do is put 20kg of hydrogen and 120 kg of oxygen in LEO for 120 days. 2 weeks before the 120 days ends it must be liquified and stored in seperate tanks at 16 psi. If you go the easy route and just launch an orbiting fuel tank, you could probably get away with a system massing no more than 300-400 kg. (The Russian Shtill could put that into LEO for approx. $200K)
The first stage is the gun itself, and probably a discrading sabot. The second stage is a standard rocket engine, which would light off once a reasonable altitude is reached.
The point is that there has been a lot of research done on this subject, and it can work.
The HARP program tested a gun capable of sending a 2-stage rocket to 180 km, and they had to cancel the program due to funding cuts well before they reached the limit of the technology.
Comets are (mostly) giant ice balls, since they're too small to have atmosphere where did the ice come from?
Seriously folks, water doesn't require an atmosphere to form, hydrogen and oxygen are found throughout the solar system (in varying concentrations). It just so happens that we ended up with quite a lot of water here, while there is not so much elsewhere.
1. TFA from 2 days ago mentioned the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter (today's TFA) 2. Where do you get the left hand not knowing what the right is doing bit?
The whole point of the LRO is to map the moon so they can decide where they want to land future missions.
The most likely concepts are 2+ stage rockets, using the cannon (railgun, conventional, etc.) for primary acceleration. Yes, a large amount of energy is lost to frictional heating as soon as the rocket leaves the barrel, which is why it is essential to place the gun at a high altitude and appropriate launch angle.
The economic advantage of this method is it reduces the amount of fuel the vehicle has to carry by delegating the initial acceleration to ground-based resources. At the very least you could get rid of the SRB's, which weigh 589,000 Kg each, and possibly the EFT as well. That's over 1.9 million kg you do not need to launch.
All military hardware is at least partially EM shielded (or hardened) Actual combat vehicles have greater protection and also alot of redundant systems.
The big deal with an EMP is that it creates a massive voltage surge in any conductive material. Voltage limiting gear can help greatly, as well as the ability to work around blown components with backup systems. Encasing the entire electrical system in a Faraday Cage also helps by setting up counter EM fields to reduce the Voltage surge.
Well, despite the fact that we seem to be able to move back and forth in space, in reality we are all traveling at such a great velocity in the direction of galactic rotation (and universal rotation on an even bigger scale) that we can only change the rate of our journey in that 1 direction by a very small percentage. Thus we travel in 1 direction while having the illusion of traveling unhindered in 3 space.
To begin with it would probably be used by amateur astronomy groups, but considering the current prices on computing power, it should be affordable fairly soon.
See, you have plenty of social skills, you just decline to use them.
People who lack 'social skills' have problems understanding the common rules of social behavior. They literally do not know how to respond in a social situation, and often make embarassing social errors.
We call them social Skills, because for most of us these behavioral rules can be learned. Many pick them up automatically as they grow up, by watching and mimicing adults.
Autistic individuals not only don't know the rules, they often can't understand them when they are explained.
Contrary to the article, lack of social skills is NOT the main feature of autism. Lack of social skills can indeed be a symptom, but there is more to it than that.
Autistics process information differently than "normal" individuals. Often the brain cannot manage multiple stimuli at once, leading to short attention spans or obsession with a specific thought or concept. Sensory overload is not uncommon, and often the autistic individual will retreat to a comforting mental space as a coping mechanism. When this mental space involves a skill we term this a Savant.
Autistic individuals can also have impulse control problems.
Lack of social skills is most likely caused by an inability to process all the information coming in and so an autistic individual misses out on most of the interaction. Attempting to mimic poorly understood behavior can lead to even more social problems.
I would wager that there is a stronger link between ADHD and Autism than there is with being analytical.
No, They think they need a way to better control the propaganda.
Propaganda is the art of providing false or misleading information to the public to influence opinion. More often than not you need different propaganda messages for different audiences. You tell your allies (and your citizens) that you are doing a just and righteous thing, and you back it up with some facts in case they do some fact checking. You tell your enemies that you will annihilate them completely unless they give in. You tell your enemey's citizens that they will be given amnesty and freedom to choose their own government and way of life. You tell the rest of the world that you will provide guidance and security to the new government.
This is most effective if you do not have to worry about conflicting messages getting to the wrong audience. In today's world, with the growing dominance of blogs and online media, as well as the lax fact-checking going on in main stream media, it is impossible to seperate audiences, and you have to be sure that any message you put out says exactly what you want everyone to hear.
They actually tried a number of different plywood rigs, they took sheets of single ply (1/8" thick) and glued them together in various arrangements to construct a rough parachute (maximum surface area to weight) And still couldn't get it to keep buster from crashing.
Actually, mu metal is more appropriate for redirecting a constant magnetic field, which barely qualifies as shielding.
A Faraday cage (if grounded) will shield from EM radiation, that is it protects the interior from rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields. Granted, you have to be very careful about any openings into the cage, and be aware of which wavelegths of EM radiation can pass through them.
That said, the field experienced by a passenger is more likely to be stable to within a small degree, but there are ways to design the magnetic circuit to minimize the field inside the elevator. And yes, mu metal would be the logical way to design the circuit, but you hardly need to cover the entire cabin with it.
I Am An Architect Elevator shafts have major problems during a fire, they provide passage for smoke throughout a building, which typically causes 90% of fire-related deaths in buildings with unprotected elevators.
Methods of preventing this are 1. Seal the elevator doors (minor airlock, maintenance issues) 2. Overpressure (fire activated blowers provide fresh air to shaft) 3. Fire seals (fire activated doors or curtains seal shaft)
Your vacuum would just make this more of a problem.
But a shockwave is a sharp pressure differential, on the order of a sawtooth wave, which in a stationary object would almost have to be created by an explosion. The shockwave propagates through a medium at the same velocity as more conventional compression waves (sound)
A high amplitude sawtooth (or as near as practical) sound wave at the resonant frequency of the medium may be able to mimic the high pressure differential and synchronized atomic motion of a shockwave.
Of course, these are after all piezo crystals we are talking about here, so perhaps a properly timed voltage differential could be applied to generate the same effect.
Resonant stimulation would likely produce a continual low-intensity beam of coherent light (although these are actually microwave frequencies, not visible light)
Defects in crystal structure should not affect coherence until structural collapse of the crystal, because the coherent photons are only emitted from the small area just behind the shockwave, within approx 50nm (according to the graph from the simulation) which is approx 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength of the emitted light.
So FTFA they have determined through mathematical modeling (verified by experiments with NaCl) that a piezoelectric crystal can create coherent light from the uniform motion of the atoms when the crystal is deformed by a shockwave.
Makes me wonder if sonic stimulation at the resonant frequency could be an effective low-power LASER equivalent.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, one of the major experiments 'debunking' cold fusion in the beginning (the MIT study) turned out to have used improperly manipulated data and was a false negative.
In the aftermath of the media storm surrounding cold fusion, merely mentioning an interest in the theory (unless you specifically stated you wanted to debunk it) was grounds for dismissal at many scientific institutions.
Cold Fusion (in the sense that a nuclear reaction happens at approximate room temperature by chemical processes) is happening. thousands of papers have been published proving the effect. No, they haven't been published in any respected 'peer-reviewed' papers, because any mention of CF is immediately declared impossible and bad-science.
(Obligatory)
I for one welcome our new sensible alien overlords.
Now if only they would get around to the rest of the country, we might be able to turn this fiasco called the 21st Century around.
I don't care where 'e grips it, quantum swallows are both migrat'ry an' non-migrat'ry at the same time. The real question is whether or not Schrodinger's Cat can catch one before the collapse of the coconut waveform.
Ya know, that's all well and good, but I just wanted to point out that humans and some other terrestrial plants and animals can and do live in a long day cycle. Above the arctic circle, there are towns that don't see sun for up to 67 days each year, at winter solstice, and have continuous sun for over 4 days in summer (atmospheric refraction accounts for why its not balanced)
From TFA
"Fuel Depot Challenge: Expected to award a $5 million prize to the first team to build, launch and demonstrate a sub-scale facility that could store or produce liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen - used to fuel spacecraft - in Earth orbit. In November 2005, NASA chief Michael Griffin said future space missions would rely on privately built fuel stations for resupply."
Basically this is little more than a satellite with onboard fuel storage / generation.
Without a significant orbital industry, the only way I can think to "produce" liquid hydrogen and oxygen in situ would be to ship water to the satellite and use solar or nuclear power to crack and compress it. Aside from the water delivery the whole thing could easily be done robotically.
Yes, it will probably cost 10-20 mil to develop and put it up there, but certainly not 100 mil.
PS.
From the actual proposed rules, all you have to do is put 20kg of hydrogen and 120 kg of oxygen in LEO for 120 days. 2 weeks before the 120 days ends it must be liquified and stored in seperate tanks at 16 psi.
If you go the easy route and just launch an orbiting fuel tank, you could probably get away with a system massing no more than 300-400 kg. (The Russian Shtill could put that into LEO for approx. $200K)
3waygeek - "God, I feel old..."
God - "How do you think I feel?"
The first stage is the gun itself, and probably a discrading sabot. The second stage is a standard rocket engine, which would light off once a reasonable altitude is reached.
The point is that there has been a lot of research done on this subject, and it can work.
The HARP program tested a gun capable of sending a 2-stage rocket to 180 km, and they had to cancel the program due to funding cuts well before they reached the limit of the technology.
Comets are (mostly) giant ice balls, since they're too small to have atmosphere where did the ice come from?
Seriously folks, water doesn't require an atmosphere to form, hydrogen and oxygen are found throughout the solar system (in varying concentrations). It just so happens that we ended up with quite a lot of water here, while there is not so much elsewhere.
2 Things
1. TFA from 2 days ago mentioned the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter (today's TFA)
2. Where do you get the left hand not knowing what the right is doing bit?
The whole point of the LRO is to map the moon so they can decide where they want to land future missions.
http://www.fas.org/ has a good summary of various cannon launched concepts at http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1998/05/980500-bull.h tm
The most likely concepts are 2+ stage rockets, using the cannon (railgun, conventional, etc.) for primary acceleration. Yes, a large amount of energy is lost to frictional heating as soon as the rocket leaves the barrel, which is why it is essential to place the gun at a high altitude and appropriate launch angle.
The economic advantage of this method is it reduces the amount of fuel the vehicle has to carry by delegating the initial acceleration to ground-based resources. At the very least you could get rid of the SRB's, which weigh 589,000 Kg each, and possibly the EFT as well. That's over 1.9 million kg you do not need to launch.
EMP isn't all its cracked up to be.
All military hardware is at least partially EM shielded (or hardened)
Actual combat vehicles have greater protection and also alot of redundant systems.
The big deal with an EMP is that it creates a massive voltage surge in any conductive material. Voltage limiting gear can help greatly, as well as the ability to work around blown components with backup systems. Encasing the entire electrical system in a Faraday Cage also helps by setting up counter EM fields to reduce the Voltage surge.
Well, despite the fact that we seem to be able to move back and forth in space, in reality we are all traveling at such a great velocity in the direction of galactic rotation (and universal rotation on an even bigger scale) that we can only change the rate of our journey in that 1 direction by a very small percentage. Thus we travel in 1 direction while having the illusion of traveling unhindered in 3 space.
To begin with it would probably be used by amateur astronomy groups, but considering the current prices on computing power, it should be affordable fairly soon.
When I point it at the girl next door?
See, you have plenty of social skills, you just decline to use them.
People who lack 'social skills' have problems understanding the common rules of social behavior. They literally do not know how to respond in a social situation, and often make embarassing social errors.
We call them social Skills, because for most of us these behavioral rules can be learned. Many pick them up automatically as they grow up, by watching and mimicing adults.
Autistic individuals not only don't know the rules, they often can't understand them when they are explained.
IANAPsy
Contrary to the article, lack of social skills is NOT the main feature of autism. Lack of social skills can indeed be a symptom, but there is more to it than that.
Autistics process information differently than "normal" individuals. Often the brain cannot manage multiple stimuli at once, leading to short attention spans or obsession with a specific thought or concept. Sensory overload is not uncommon, and often the autistic individual will retreat to a comforting mental space as a coping mechanism. When this mental space involves a skill we term this a Savant.
Autistic individuals can also have impulse control problems.
Lack of social skills is most likely caused by an inability to process all the information coming in and so an autistic individual misses out on most of the interaction. Attempting to mimic poorly understood behavior can lead to even more social problems.
I would wager that there is a stronger link between ADHD and Autism than there is with being analytical.
No, They think they need a way to better control the propaganda.
Propaganda is the art of providing false or misleading information to the public to influence opinion. More often than not you need different propaganda messages for different audiences.
You tell your allies (and your citizens) that you are doing a just and righteous thing, and you back it up with some facts in case they do some fact checking. You tell your enemies that you will annihilate them completely unless they give in. You tell your enemey's citizens that they will be given amnesty and freedom to choose their own government and way of life. You tell the rest of the world that you will provide guidance and security to the new government.
This is most effective if you do not have to worry about conflicting messages getting to the wrong audience.
In today's world, with the growing dominance of blogs and online media, as well as the lax fact-checking going on in main stream media, it is impossible to seperate audiences, and you have to be sure that any message you put out says exactly what you want everyone to hear.
Well, at least we don't have to worry about Dark Matter critters lurking in deep space.
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20040311.html
They actually tried a number of different plywood rigs, they took sheets of single ply (1/8" thick) and glued them together in various arrangements to construct a rough parachute (maximum surface area to weight) And still couldn't get it to keep buster from crashing.
Yes, but that was not the myth.
The myth AFAIK was that you can start a fire by firing a pistol (with bullet).
And the B team spends as much time per myth as the A team, they just don't get as much usable footage out of it.
Actually, mu metal is more appropriate for redirecting a constant magnetic field, which barely qualifies as shielding.
A Faraday cage (if grounded) will shield from EM radiation, that is it protects the interior from rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields. Granted, you have to be very careful about any openings into the cage, and be aware of which wavelegths of EM radiation can pass through them.
That said, the field experienced by a passenger is more likely to be stable to within a small degree, but there are ways to design the magnetic circuit to minimize the field inside the elevator. And yes, mu metal would be the logical way to design the circuit, but you hardly need to cover the entire cabin with it.
I Am An Architect
Elevator shafts have major problems during a fire, they provide passage for smoke throughout a building, which typically causes 90% of fire-related deaths in buildings with unprotected elevators.
Methods of preventing this are
1. Seal the elevator doors (minor airlock, maintenance issues)
2. Overpressure (fire activated blowers provide fresh air to shaft)
3. Fire seals (fire activated doors or curtains seal shaft)
Your vacuum would just make this more of a problem.
A shockwave is not a sound wave, true.
But a shockwave is a sharp pressure differential, on the order of a sawtooth wave, which in a stationary object would almost have to be created by an explosion. The shockwave propagates through a medium at the same velocity as more conventional compression waves (sound)
A high amplitude sawtooth (or as near as practical) sound wave at the resonant frequency of the medium may be able to mimic the high pressure differential and synchronized atomic motion of a shockwave.
Of course, these are after all piezo crystals we are talking about here, so perhaps a properly timed voltage differential could be applied to generate the same effect.
Sorry, misread TFA (experimental SIMULATIONS)
Resonant stimulation would likely produce a continual low-intensity beam of coherent light (although these are actually microwave frequencies, not visible light)
Defects in crystal structure should not affect coherence until structural collapse of the crystal, because the coherent photons are only emitted from the small area just behind the shockwave, within approx 50nm (according to the graph from the simulation) which is approx 5 orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength of the emitted light.
So FTFA they have determined through mathematical modeling (verified by experiments with NaCl) that a piezoelectric crystal can create coherent light from the uniform motion of the atoms when the crystal is deformed by a shockwave.
Makes me wonder if sonic stimulation at the resonant frequency could be an effective low-power LASER equivalent.